Observations on noise

There is one, and only one, advantage of modern mass mawkishness: the minute's silence that it engenders with increasing frequency. Sometimes, indeed, it seems as if our only hope of relief from the jangling noise of modern society is the minute's silence that follows a horrible murder or a terrorist attack: otherwise, we are destined for continual cacophony.

During each minute's silence, I recall Stravinsky's review of the premiere of John Cage's "4'33"", which required a pianist to sit at a piano for four minutes and 33 seconds and play nothing: wickedly he looked forward to more compositions in this genre. But why only a minute's silence? Why not ten? Surely we need freedom from speech at least as much as we need freedom of speech.

But modern man is uneasy with silence, except as a brief interlude during which to shed a crocodile tear or two while his neighbour is watching.

Whenever I phone one of my patients, day or night, the television is almost always on in his home. Not infrequently, the wireless is on as well.

Most young people under the age of 30 are rendered equally nervous by silence; and hospitals, which in my childhood were supposed to be temples of calm, are now resorts of entertainment. No nursing station is complete without its miniature ghetto-blaster, playing rap or reggae to nurses who claim not to be able to concentrate without it, while outside my door in the outpatient clinic, I can hear the television loudly relaying aerobic dancing or scuba-diving lessons to people with multiple sclerosis or senile dementia. There's no escaping noise, and most people don't seem to want to do so.

Why is this? It's a question of how people are brought up. If you have never from birth been without electronically produced music or chatter, then its sudden absence must give rise to withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety and the jitters. This is precisely what many young people tell me: that without a background of wireless or television, they feel bereft.

Does it matter, though, so long as the electricity doesn't run out? I suspect that it does. Without the ability to appreciate silence, a whole human faculty, that of contemplation, is lost. Perhaps if you are used to silence, you can learn to contemplate in the midst of a brouhaha; but if all you have ever known is a brouhaha, I doubt you will ever learn contemplation.

Many inmates in the prison in which I work ask me to give them a drug that will stop them thinking: not thinking any particular unpleasant thoughts, or recalling unpleasant memories, but to stop them thinking anything at all. "Can't you stop my brain thinking, doctor?" the prisoners ask. They want an elevated mood independent of any other cerebral activity.

Is it not at least possible that noise brings about the anaesthetic state in modern daily life that the prisoners so ardently seek? Noise is like a powerfully addictive drug: when it stops, the thinking has to start. Heroin, many addicts tell me, blots things out; so does modern distraction by noise. The emptiness within is drowned out by the cacophony without.

So the jitters that people get when they are plunged into silence are existential in nature. That is why the young socialise - or forgather - in such noise that conversation is impossible. It disguises from them the terrible and horrifying fact that they have nothing to say to one another.

The author is a GP

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